“ ‘You can’t buy it, but it has a price,’ said Oryx. ‘Everything has a price’ ” (Atwood 138). If everything has a price then everything is a product and if something is a product, it is made to be used in some shape or form. What of love though? Does love follow under the category of something? In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, Jimmy, the protagonist, hints at the idea that love cannot be bought in his discussion with Oryx. How ironic this idea is for Jimmy to consider when the reader considers Jimmy’s use of love. Jimmy is in a relationship with Oryx but love is not what is motivating him to be there: a desire for power, to be able to use and influence someone is his motivation. Jimmy uses Oryx to satisfy these underlying needs which originate from his childhood. Jimmy’s interaction with his depressed mother funnelled his desire to use power to create a reaction in his mother. He further progresses this need as he studies and experiences the power of language at Martha Graham, the art university he attends after high school. This fundamental need for power finally extends out into Jimmy’s eventual relationship with Oryx as he treats her as another object to exert his power over. Evidentially Crake, Jimmy’s best friend and employer, understands Jimmy’s desire and uses his relationship with Oryx to complete his own world rejuvenation plan. Through Jimmy’s interaction with his depressed mother and the reactions he experiences in using language, Jimmy develops an intense need for power which is why he does not genuinely love Oryx which consequently, results in Crake’s cunning ability to use Jimmy.
Jimmy does not love Oryx because simply put, their story is not based upon love. Margaret Atwood herself alludes to this fact a...
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...’s quote on everything having a price rings true. Jimmy’s desire, his intellectual obsession for power, pays the price as he ends up it what appears to be the only survivor of a world apocalypse while taking care of Crake’s non-human humans. Why did not Jimmy just love Oryx? Although, it is not really in his DNA to love. Jimmy is a product of maternal love or rather the lack of.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context’.” Modern Language Association 119.3 (2004): 513-517. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 28 March 2014.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009. Print.
Banerjee, Suparna. “Towards Feminist Mother: Oppositional Maternal Practice in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 14.1 (2013): 236-247. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 28 March 2014.
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a story heavily influenced by the Bible and has many biblical themes that are used to prove Atwood’s belief in balance. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead, which was formerly the United States. The story is told through the perspective of a handmaid named Offred and begins when she is placed at her third assignment as a housemaid. Offred describes her society as a fundamentalist theocracy where the Christian God is seen as the divine Ruler over the Republic of Gilead.
The character of Jay Gatsby was a wealthy business man, who the author developed as arrogant and tasteless. Gatsby's love interest, Daisy Buchanan, was a subdued socialite who was married to the dim witted Tom Buchanan. She is the perfect example of how women of her level of society were supposed to act in her day. The circumstances surrounding Gatsby and Daisy's relationship kept them eternally apart. For Daisy to have been with Gatsby would have been forbidden, due to the fact that she was married. That very concept of their love being forbidden, also made it all the more intense, for the idea of having a prohibited love, like William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, made it all the more desirable. Gatsby was remembering back five years to when Daisy was not married and they were together:
Thesis: In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood characterizes Handmaids, as women with expectations to obey the society’s hierarchy, as reproducers, symbolizing how inferior the Handmaid class is to others within Gilead; the class marginalization of Handmaids reveals the use of hierarchical control exerted to eliminate societal flaws among citizens.
Ingersoll, Earl G. “Survival In Margaret Atwood’s “Novel Oryx And Crake.” Extrapolation (University Of Texas At
Staels, Hilde. “Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Resistance Through Narrating.”Critical Insights (227-245) From English Studies 76.5 (1995): 455-464. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
The Great Gatsby set in the glistening and glittering world of wealth and glamour of 1920s Jazz Age in America. However, the story of the poor boy who tried to fulfill the American Dream of living a richer and fuller life ends in Gatsby’s demise. One of the reasons for the tragedy is the corrupting influence of greed on Gatsby. As soon as Gatsby starts to see money as means of transforming his fantasy of winning Daisy’s love into reality, his dream turns into illusion. However, other characters of the novel are also affected by greed. On closer inspection it turns out that almost every individual in the novel is covetous of something other people have. In this view, the meaning of greed in the novel may be varied The greed is universally seen as desire for material things. However, in recent studies the definition of “greed” has come to include sexual greed and greed as idolatry, understood as fascination with a deity or a certain image (Rosner 2007, p. 7). The extended definition of greed provides valuable framework for research on The Great Gatsby because the objects of characters’ desires can be material, such as money and possessions, or less tangible, such as love or relationship.
Callaway, Alanna A., "Women disunited : Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale as a critique of feminism" (2008). Master's Theses. Paper 3505.
.... Since Wives do not have the ability to have a baby, they ask Handmaids to sleep with their husbands once a month to bear a baby. Their husbands cannot see Handmaids except for every month’s Ceremony. Because the husband cannot kiss and touch Handmaids when they have sex, the husbands go to night clubs to dally with Jezebels. In this society, women each have a function and become the victims of patriarchal ruling. Once we lapse in dealing with the gender relationship, what will the situation be for the entire human society? In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood puts this worry into her feminist dystopia, a real nightmare. Although the sufferings everyone undertakes in the novel will not occur in the real world, the novel conceives a unique, horrible social panorama, exaggerating and magnifying the gender tension in the real world, containing the criticism of reality.
Bouson, J. Brooks. Margaret Atwood the robber bride, the blind assassin, Oryx and Crake. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
In Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates a society of oppression in which she redefines oppression in common culture. Gilead is a society characterized by highly regulated systems of social control and extreme regulation of the female body. The instinctive need to “protect and preserve” the female body is driven by the innate biological desires of the men. The manipulation of language, commodification, and attire, enhances the theme of oppression and highlights the imbalance of power in the Gilead society.
“Oryx and Crake” is a novel by Margaret Atwood that demonstrates how certain intriguing, distinctive characters develop themselves. Her novel demonstrates how there is no simple way of discovering oneself, but rather a combined method. Margaret Atwood’s book Oryx and Crake demonstrates that both the constituted and atomistic methods of self-discovery must be practiced to fully understand oneself. The captivating characters and people in her book Oryx and Crake demonstrate this.
Staels, Hilde. "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; Resistance Through Narrating ." English Studies (1995): 455-467.
The world has changed since The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1986. Oryx and Crake is a continuation of and a development of many of the ideas first brought up in The Handmaid’s Tale. Although the details are different, the terrifying possibility of either future is enough to make anyone question the morals of the world today and stay vigilant against these warnings offered by the author.
Jay Gatsby believes that wealth and power can lead to love and happiness. He spends his entire life trying to create himself and change his past so that he can rekindle his love affair with the love of his life Daisy Buchanan. The two were young lovers, unable to be together because of very different social statuses. After Gatsby learns that he cannot be with Daisy because of this, he spends the rest of his life attempting to acquire wealth and power.
As The Handmaid’s Tale is considered an allegory of the social injustice women face against traditional expectations of their role in society, the symbolism of the Handmaids and other women as a whole for repressed feminine liberty and sexuality allows Atwood to connect her work to the theme between gender and expectations in her society. As Handmaids in the Republic of Gilead, females are stripped of their previous identity and are defined as a tool of reproduction for the men who is assigned them. At its core, these females are forced against their will to be mere tools, experiencing unwanted sex at least once a month, which Gilead names “The Ceremony”, hiding its true nature as a form of rape. Offred